


Consider Your Time(line)

by radio_silent



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst, Asshole Mark, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, boys' night out, but i promise it leads to reconciliation, kinda-ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 07:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6508096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radio_silent/pseuds/radio_silent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Harvard, Mark decides to repair his friendship with Eduardo. Chris and Dustin run damage control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consider Your Time(line)

**Author's Note:**

> Years after starting a WIP time travel AU for TSN, I decided to post the first chapter as a stand-alone fic. Here’s why Mark wants to go back in time. (Hint: It’s Eduardo. He totally wants to back in time for Eduardo.)
> 
> The whole AU became one of those fics I spend FAR more time thinking about than writing--so if anyone wants to hear anecdotes/excerpts from the WIP, let me know! I'd be happy to share, even if I never get the full thing written up.

At fifteen minutes past midnight, Dustin is smiling that clueless, goony smile of his. Mark can’t really take responsibility for Dustin’s smile—the Tequila shots Dustin has been downing since 7 p.m. probably count for more than Mark’s presence does—but still, it’s good to know that Dustin looks pleased.  Dustin looks pleased even in spite of the fact that they are alone in a bar on a “Boys’ Night Out,” (Seriously. _That’s_ what Dustin chose to call it.) which objectively sounds pretty pathetic. And that’s not even taking into account that this unfortunately titled evening, which turned out to just be Dustin and Mark sitting in a corner booth in the back of a bar on a weeknight, has been forever immortalized in the _publicly visible_ _Facebook Event_ Dustin created.

But Dustin is smiling, so “Boys’ Night Out” seems to be actually turning out okay. Until it’s sixteen minutes past midnight, of course, and Dustin opens his mouth.  

“You know,” Dustin slurs, “it’s too bad Wardo can’t be here.”

“Huh,” Mark says.

Dustin processes his own words a few seconds later—maybe triggered by Mark’s reaction, but probably just triggered by the sound of his voice finally registering in his alcohol-addled brain. Mark knows the exact second when Dustin’s processed what he’s just said, because Dustin first gapes his mouth in a wide, comic “o” and then shuts his mouth just as quickly, pressing his lips together as if that will stop them from ever opening again…though, statically speaking, that is highly—tragically—unlikely. Mark watches silently, noticing how Dustin facepalms and then proceeds to peek at Mark’s face every couple seconds. Apparently Dustin doesn’t like what he sees on Mark’s face, or maybe he’s just that far gone. Whatever the reason, in the end he gives up on holding his hands over his eyes and just starts smacking his forehead with his palm over and over. It’s some sort of strange animalistic ritual; Stanford’s anthropology grad students would pay to write papers about this moment.

Also, Dustin’s now muttering something that sounds like, “I didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything, that did not happen Mark, I am silent like a stone because at least stones are _shhhh._ ”

Mark can’t be sure, but his friend might be going insane.

It had been a little weird, though. Mark can admit to himself that Dustin’s comment had been weird. He hasn’t heard anyone use Eduardo’s nickname in over a year now. No one talks about Eduardo around him, for whatever reason. And “Wardo,” as a nickname, is also weird, an uncomfortable mix of familiar and forbidden. Just hearing the word inspires Mark to wonder if it’s too late to take another shot.

If Dustin doesn’t stop muttering and smacking his head soon someone might actually come by haul him off to an insane asylum—or Dustin might just keep hitting himself forever and eventually dislodge some brain matter he really can’t afford to lose. So Mark says, “It’s fine,” in the vain hope of shutting Dustin up.

Dustin freezes and stares at Mark, gaping again. He slowly, he closes his mouth, only to open it moments later to speak. “Suuure,” Dustin says. It’s so incredulous-sounding that Mark’s tempted to protest. It’s only from years of experience (unfortunate experience) that Mark knows that Dustin is like a puppy dog: giving Dustin anything, even if it’s a statement that he’s wrong or an order to shut up, will only feed Dustin’s enthusiasm.

So Mark just leans back in his seat in the booth and stares Dustin straight in the eye. He raises one eyebrow.

He waits.

 “Fine!” Dustin says approximately seven seconds later. He smacks his hands on the table as though they’ve just finished an hour-long argument. “I’m just gonna go, then, don’t mind me.”

What this really means is that he’s going to go over to the bar and try to hit on women, which is somewhat of a tradition and always amusing. It also means Dustin isn’t actually angry. Though, just in case Mark can’t correctly read social cues (which obviously he can, despite certain claims to the contrary), Dustin comes straight back to say “I’m sorry, man!” In reply, Mark smirks and says, “Go.”

It is, relatively, very easy to be Dustin’s friend.

Besides, it’s not as though Dustin has committed a cardinal offense. Free speech exists and Dustin is welcome to it—it would be pretty ironic for the guy who invented Facebook to try to stifle anyone’s interpersonal communication. And no one ever seems to believe Mark can handle the practicalities of what had happened with Eduardo Saverin, which is also ridiculous. If anything, Mark finds it amusing, the way people avoid the topic. If they looked at his actions, like how Mark already reinstated Eduardo as the co-founder of Facebook on the masthead, they would know Mark was fine.

When Dustin drunkenly slips and says something like “It’s too bad Wardo can’t be here,” it only serves to show how little people understand. Of course Eduardo can’t be here tonight. You can’t reject someone from a company and then expect them to share drinks with you over a year later. Eduardo is in Singapore now, just like Chris is in D.C.  People move on. Mark doesn’t regret his decision to drop Eduardo from the Facebook team, and Mark wouldn’t ask Eduardo to come back in a million years. Eduardo had his chance and he blew it. Like when Eduardo had frozen the account, just because felt angry.  A CFO couldn’t pull shit like that; Facebook couldn’t get held back because its CFO let his emotions get in the way.

There were other ways Eduardo proved that he wasn’t right for Facebook. From the beginning, the most important parts of Facebook had happened as quick and rational decisions: ignoring the Winklevii, adding a relationship status, dropping the ‘the.’  Mark had the idea—or heard the idea—and he knew what was right. You couldn’t wait around to think it over, and you couldn’t lose your advantage by sitting in class with your hand raised, waiting for your professor to call out your name.

Eduardo believed in deliberation, careful thought, and extensive worry. Eduardo didn’t get that intuition is what earns you a billion dollars _._

In the end, what happened with Eduardo turned out to be just another quick, correct decision.

Mark looks down at their pile of empty shot glasses before twisting backwards to see how Dustin is faring at the bar. So far Mark has matched Dustin shot for shot, but he has been drinking vodka shots instead of Tequila, so Dustin’s attempt tonight should be especially good. Besides, watching Dustin talk to girls at a bar is better than thinking about dropping Eduardo from Facebook—even if Mark doesn’t _mind_ thinking about it, the way people seem to think he does.

At the moment Dustin is trying to pull a busty blonde. Of course she is unquestionably out of his league—Mark would expect nothing less. Back at Harvard it had become a predictable pattern: towards the end of every night out Mark and Eduardo would end up alone in the booth while Chris and Dustin went off to flirt with people at the bar. Chris could hold his own with the few gay men around, or make casual conversation with one of the girls. Dustin’s flirting attempts, however, trended toward disastrous. Since Eduardo refused to mock Dustin, but he also never stopped Mark from making observations aloud, it always fell to Mark to offer a running commentary of the proceedings. Which worked out fine—more times than not Eduardo would grin down at his lap, as if trying to hide his smile, as Mark suggested how terribly each of Dustin’s flirting attempts might end.

_Drink thrown in his face. Her ex-boyfriend will come over to shut this down. Her friends are already laughing at him—look, Wardo.  A restraining order._

Every time Eduardo would smile at his own lap, and so sometimes, sure, Mark would say increasingly horrible things, less to insult Dustin (although Dustin’s drunken attempts deserved any mockery they incurred) than to see if he could get Eduardo to break into actual laughter. He wonders what faces Eduardo might make at him if he were here now, if they were together watching Dustin and the blonde girl.

Mark knows, objectively, such things are impossible. But in an alternate universe Eduardo might be sitting in the booth across from Mark, or perhaps next to him, like back at Harvard. Eduardo would have done shots with them, too. He’d probably be just as far gone as Mark now, sitting too close beside him and trying not to snicker.

(Sometimes Mark wasn’t even watching Dustin as he estimated how Dustin’s night might end. All past evidence suggested it wouldn’t go well, so it didn’t really matter how Dustin interacted with any given girl. Besides, if Mark had been watching Dustin the whole time Mark would have missed seeing the way Eduardo bit his lip to stop from grinning too widely. He would have missed Eduardo’s precise expression on those three nights Eduardo finally broke down and laughed.)

The vodka must be stronger than Mark had thought, because Mark suddenly, desperately, wishes he could make Eduardo laugh again. He can still remember what Eduardo’s laugh sounded like—it’s barely been over a year, after all—but Mark irrationally wonders if he could be remembering it wrong.

It shouldn’t matter, Eduardo’s laugh.  It doesn’t concern Mark. Eduardo isn’t laughing anywhere near enough that Mark can hear it—that is if Eduardo’s even laughing at all. Mark wonders if Eduardo had found someone else to say the kind of terrible things that could make Eduardo smile. It doesn’t seem very likely.

The thing is, even if it’s the correct decision, even if it’s simple logic, it isn’t easy to cut out someone who once mattered. Even now, with Eduardo halfway across the globe, Mark still sometimes catches sight of dirty dishes piled up in his house and realizes he’s waiting for someone to notice and passive-aggressively comment that Mark might want to clean up sometime, because what if Mark ever wants to invite a girl over, or to live like a functional human being? He’s still waiting for Eduardo to arrive at shareholder meetings, even though the chair they set out for Eduardo (or for Eduardo’s representative, at the very least) always goes unused. Mark always seems to be expecting Eduardo during those meetings—as if taking time out of his busy day just to try to explain his work wasn’t useless enough. (If he’s doing his job right, shouldn’t the website speak for itself?) Shareholder meetings are like torture: an entire morning where Mark isn’t allowed to code and has to forcibly stop himself from staring at the one recurrently empty seat.

Mark expects Eduardo to jump in whenever Facebook’s programmers come up with shitty, inelegant algorithms and think that they might actually be good enough. He was waiting for him to say something that one time Dustin forced Mark to go grab food from the Facebook cafeteria and their special of the day happened to be their “double the chicken” sandwiches. That time he was waiting for Eduardo to say something mostly so Mark could counter by mocking him endlessly with some pointed references to the Chicken Incident, but he was waiting just the same.  

Even so, Mark is secure in the knowledge that all the waiting isn’t the sign of some epic friendship that he can one day resume, just like he understands why Eduardo can’t be there, drinking with them tonight. Their friendship is over—isn’t it? These are just the aftershocks.

From somewhere near the bar someone laughs, and the sound is so incredibly _incorrect_ that Mark shivers involuntarily. He doesn’t want to do this anymore, he wants to stop expecting and waiting—but he isn’t sure how he can stop. It’s been over a year now, and _understanding_ the situation hasn’t seemed to help.

It's like Mark had programmed a _do-while_ loop where the condition will always remain true. While _Eduardo still pertains to Mark’s life—_ even if Eduardo isn’t _part_ of Mark’s life—Mark will…do what, exactly?

Normally when Mark catches an obvious bug in his code he will work tirelessly to fix it, but Mark can’t wire in and solve this. He can’t seem to ignore Eduardo, even if Eduardo is no longer around.

Mark stands, gripping the table edge to stop himself from swaying. He has been keeping up with Dustin’s drinking after all.

Dustin, peppy as ever, has apparently failed with the blonde (shocking) and is now trying to insert himself into a circle of women all wearing pink t-shirts and matching tiaras. Mark doesn’t stay to witness the carnage. He pushes himself away from the table and walks out. Out on the street he takes a deep breath and misses the cold, sobering air of Boston for the first time in years. He sends Dustin a text that says he’s headed home, so Dustin won’t worry, and then Mark goes to sleep off the booze and the uncomfortable feeling located somewhere near his stomach.  

He can’t wire in, but he can do that much.

***

When Mark wakes up the next morning he has a hangover, but a few hours with a pounding headache aggravated by the fluorescent lighting at his office are blissful in comparison to the moment when his new assistant chirpily suggests that he doesn’t look so good, and maybe he should grab something from the cafeteria—did Mark know that their special today is that “double the chicken” sandwich? Mark snorts, then Mark remembers why he’s snorting, then Mark suddenly remembers the rest of the end of last night.

The thing is, if Mark thought the excessive sappiness was the alcohol, he seems to have been sorely mistaken. The uncomfortable feeling in his gut is still there. Maybe he should schedule an emergency appointment at the doctor’s; maybe he’s dying of cancer or something.

Somehow, Mark doubts it.

Mark nods at his assistant and waits until she shuts the door (slams, really, and between this and the part where she thinks that Mark has any level of interest about the daily cafeteria special, she might as well have handed in a resignation) before he picks up his iPhone.

He’s tried wiring in today—it hasn’t worked. Now he searches down his list of contacts for Chris’ number. Chris was always better than the rest of them when it came to emotions. There was a reason Chris did their PR. It would totally figure if there’s some secret to forgetting people that only Chris knows about. Even an inevitably embarrassing phone call will be worth it if Mark can put this subject to rest, and of all people Chris will know what to do.

But then, if his mother’s favorite saying is right, and the first step in solving a problem was knowing you have a problem, then isn’t Mark halfway there, all on his own? He feels…oddly hopeful, with the phone in his hand. He knows he has to solve this; he knows the solution. Of course he does. He strokes the touch screen and scrolls past Chris in his contacts list, which must be for the best—he doesn’t actually _want_ to talk to Chris right now, Chris and Dustin will only tease him anyway, and if you knew the right answer you didn’t wait for the professor to call on you and tell you it’s right, fuck it, _this is the right answer._ It’s the only answer, actually, and Mark isn’t going to be a baby about it. This is what Chris would tell him anyway, right? Chris would tell him to stop whining and talk to Eduardo already. He’d said that to Mark a million times before the depositions, and maybe, finally, Mark should actually follow the advice.

Fuck it. Anything had to be better than this.

Before Mark knows it, his phone is ringing in a way indicating that somewhere, presumably in Singapore, Eduardo’s phone is ringing, too.

Suddenly, it stops.

“Hello?”  Mark hears. It’s been over a year since he’s heard that voice, and longer since he’s heard that voice devoid of the anger and exhaustion Eduardo maintained through the depositions. Obviously it sounds just like he remembers; still, Mark places his free hand on his desk to steady himself. He’s shaking, just the tiniest bit.

“Hello,” he forces himself to say. He isn’t sure he can say anything else, though. It’s not like he’s about to come out with “I miss you” or “You were very important to me less than fifty-five weeks ago and I don’t think that’s likely to change anytime soon” or even “I wish we were still best friends.” Mark can’t—won’t—say any of those things. Mark isn’t actually sure there’s anything he can say now; he actually has very little idea what he’s doing. The only thing he knows is that he’s hearing Eduardo’s voice for the first time in a year, and he isn’t about to hang up.

There isn’t any sound from the phone for a while. Mark waits.

“Um.” Eduardo says. “Is this Mark?” He clears his throat. “I mean, Mark Zuckerberg?”

“Yes,” Mark says.

Eduardo whistles, long and low, and Mark pictures him in a suit (of course he’s in a suit, Eduardo’s obsessed with his suits), running a hand through his hair. (Is it cut the same?)

“Fuck…Seriously?” Eduardo says, and the tone of Eduardo’s voice makes it almost sound like he’s laughing. But if so, it’s was a far cry from Eduardo’s drunken laughter over Dustin’s antics. Eduardo doesn’t sound happy at all. “Mark, why are you calling?”

(Of course Eduardo would ask the one question Mark doesn’t know how to answer.)

“Is everything okay? Oh God, is Dustin dead or something?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Mark has experienced plenty of awkward moments. Being friends with Dustin, for example, has pretty much guaranteed Mark a lifetime supply of them. Mark usually just smirks and moves on. But this silence might be the most awkward thing Mark has ever experienced, especially considering he is entirely capable of hanging up the phone and returning back to his normal life with the single touch. There’s only one reason Mark hasn’t ended the phone call, and Mark is growing increasingly aware by the second that this reason is overwhelmingly pathetic.

Mark glares at his keyboard. He doesn’t, however, hang up.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Eduardo says.

“No,” Mark wants to say. And, “Obviously.” He isn’t sure which, but then it doesn’t matter because he can’t get the words out anyway. Eduardo must be able to hear him breathing, though, or something, because he doesn’t hang up, either.

They wait for a few seconds, trapped in awkwardness with no hope of getting out. Mark wonders in a brief flash if it’s possible he could die like this, if Dustin could find his corpse rotting years later, his phone still in his hand.

On the other end of the line, Eduardo huffs out a breath. “Listen,” he says, “I don’t know if you’re drunk,” (Mark wants to laugh, almost. He wishes he were drunk, and he has the hangover to prove it.) “or if you thought this was funny, or whatever. I settled with your lawyers because I wanted this to be over, Mark. I don’t owe you anything. I’m…I’m hanging up.”

Mark’s fingers spasm around the phone, clutching it tighter. “Wardo,” he very nearly says.

“Mark,” Eduardo says, and then pauses. Mark can picture Eduardo, in a suit somewhere, maybe in his house, maybe out on a date, anywhere, sighing what seems to be the world’s longest, most disappointed sigh. “Don’t do this—just. Don’t call me again.”

Then there’s a click, and then the line goes dead.

Mark turns back to his computer screen, which, as it turns out, is black. He hadn’t even turned the monitor on when he came in this morning, and he’s only just noticing now. He stares at the black screen for an indeterminate amount of time.

“Mark!”

Mark jerks his eyes away from the screen. He hadn’t even noticed Dustin standing at his doorway. If he had noticed, maybe he could have stopped Dustin from entering his office. It’s too late now, and this can’t go well.

“Woah, man,” Dustin says, “are you okay? You’re acting more robot-y than usual. Did you know you’ve been staring at that screen for a while now? Are you watching something? Is it funny?”

Dustin comes around behind Mark and gets a good look at the screen.  He pokes Mark’s shoulder. Mark doesn’t turn to face him.

“Marrrk,” he says. “This is seriously weird. Does this have to do with why you left early last night? Because that was not cool. Boys’ Night Out ends when we _both_ agree it ends. That is why it is called Boys’ Night Out, not One Boy’s Night Out With His Lame Friend Who Leaves Without Him.”

“It shouldn’t be called _anything_ ,” Mark mutters, and Dustin grins like he’s won something. Mark drops his head into his hands. “How are you not more hung over?”

“I’m a miracle!” Dustin crows. God, he can be such a dick sometimes. “Stop changing the subject. What’s going on? I won’t leave until you tell me!”

Unfortunately, Mark believes that.

His head still in his hands, Mark says, very quietly. “I called Eduardo.”

When Mark finally looks up, Dustin is sitting down in the chair across from Mark’s desk. His expression is weirdly serious. “You didn’t,” Dustin says.

Mark doesn’t say anything. But then, judging by Dustin’s face, he doesn’t need to.

“Oh my God, Mark, no. You didn’t. You did not call Wardo. No no no no. I knew I shouldn’t have said that last night, God, we were not drunk enough for that conversation. Mark,” Dustin whines, “I never said you should call him! Why are you twisting my words into implements of torture to torture Wardo to death with?”

Mark smirks. Never let it be said Dustin doesn’t provide some much-needed perspective in his life. “To death? Seriously?”

“Emotional death, Mark! That’s worse than actual death because you have to live with it forever. But you’re all robot-y, so I guess you wouldn’t know what that’s like. Poor Eduardo. Shit, I have to call him now.”

“Wait—you still talk to Eduardo?”

“Shit!”

Dustin runs over to Mark’s door, and Mark sustains a faint hope Dustin might actually leave—he had to go call Eduardo, after all, since apparently they never stopped talking—but instead Dustin slams Mark’s office door shut, from the inside, before running back to grab the cell phone off Mark’s desk. Dustin holds the phone over his head, as if he expects Mark to try to grab it back.

“You do not get to have this anymore,” Dustin says. “Privilege revoked.”

Mark just stares at his mentally unstable friend. Dustin frowns back.

“Having a cell phone is a privilege and not a right, Mark! As of now. You just proved it.”

“I could fire you.” Mark makes sure to say the words like he’s seriously considering them, but Dustin doesn’t even notice. His fingers are moving at the speed of light across Mark’s iPhone screen, and it’s only in that moment that Mark remembers that Dustin, no matter how ridiculously he acts, is also an excellent programmer.  Who knows what he could be doing? Or he could simply just redial Mark’s last call—Mark isn’t sure which option would be worse.

Mark would never belittle himself by jumping up and knocking the cell phone out of Dustin’s hands, except at the moment he very much wants to do that. Instead, he has to settle for standing up at a reasonable pace, only getting around his desk as Dustin triumphantly hits the button to dial out.

“I don’t think that’s…” Mark says. But then Mark hears a different voice from the one he was expecting. It’s a familiar voice nonetheless.

The voice says, “Mark, I told you, I’m not interested in doing consultant work, no matter how much you pay me. It’s not worth the anxiety, and besides, I have more important things to do now.”

Mark finds himself grabbing the phone from Dustin, putting in on speaker, and sitting back down. “The government isn’t more important than Facebook,” he informs Chris.

Chris starts in on a familiar diatribe, just like Mark expected he would, and Mark nods at Dustin, nearly grateful. If anyone can fix this, it’s Chris. Mark, on the other hand, doesn’t even know what parts he can fix. Until this morning (last night?), he didn’t even know he wanted to fix anything at all.

“Hey Chris!” Dustin interrupts. “I actually called you because…Um. You know. It’s happened.”

“What’s happened?” Chris says, reasonably confused.

Dustin sneaks a glance at Mark, leans in close to the phone, and whispers: _“We have a code pink!_ ”

Mark thinks he might have actually heard Chris gasp. And also, what the fuck, they had a code for this?

They had a code, and their code was _code pink?_

“Wait,” Chris says. “Seriously?” Mark’s desktop makes a beeping sound, and once Mark finally turns on the damn monitor he can see that Chris is now calling him on Skype. Great. Mark dutifully clicks on the button to accept the video call.

“You didn’t,” Chris tells Mark, and the inflection on his words goes up. He sounds hopeful. Like he _hopes_ Mark hasn’t contacted Eduardo.

If Mark was one of those people who cared the way Chris did about “socially acceptable behavior,” then maybe Mark would have lied and told Chris he had, indeed, just been kidding. But he isn’t one of those people. He makes enough money that he doesn’t have to even pretend to be one of those people. He’s Mark Zuckerberg—so he shrugs.

And now Skype-Chris is giving him the “you fucked up big time” face, the one he perfected during his time as Facebook’s head of PR. “What the _fuck_ , Mark” he says—and Chris never curses during work calls, even when the calls aren’t technically about his workplace anymore. Chris actually sounds angry, which is the only reason why Mark mutters, “It’s what you would have told me to do anyway.”

Then Chris, whose voice is still coming in from the phone and the computer, so that he echoes through Mark’s office, then Chris just _explodes._

“No, Mark. No it _isn’t_ what I would have told you to do. Maybe you should have _fucking consulted me_ ,” Mark refrains from mentioning that five seconds ago Chris had been explicitly telling Mark he is not available for worktime consultations, “because then I would have told you what a terrible idea this was. I would have told you that after a whole year Eduardo is only just beginning to get his shit together again, on his own, which is what he _needs to do_. You made your choice, Mark, you chose to cut him out, and actually you shouldn’t need me to tell you any of this because you already know how much those depositions hurt him. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it, too—you don’t get to just _decide_ you maybe want him back and call him. Maybe things could have gone differently, but that window of opportunity shut a long time ago.”

“It’s too late, Mark,” Chris tells him. “You both need to move on.”

Mark can see the view from his own web camera in the corner of the Skype screen. A tiny Dustin is watching Mark nervously, like at the bar last night, and a gigantic Chris is glaring at him.

They’re being ridiculous.

“It was a minute-long phone call, Chris,” Mark says. “I doubt it’ll scar him for life.”

Chris’s frown deepens, which Mark hadn’t thought was humanly possible. “Why do you even have his number in your new phone?” he asks.

Dustin seems to recover from his apprehension; he chimes in with, “Yeah, you should delete that.”

“He had been our CFO, what if I had needed his number?”

“Well, clearly you don’t need it anymore.” Chris says. Of all the things Chris has said in this conversation, for some reason Mark hates that part the most.

Still, Dustin and Chris are watching him like he’s going to say something, when there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. At this point Mark would very much like them to leave him alone to code in peace. So Mark picks up his phone, only just now hanging up on the phone call with Chris, and scrolls through to the contact entry for Eduardo Saverin. He holds it up so Dustin can see and he deletes Eduardo’s information.

Dustin gives Chris a thumbs-up across the video screen.

Chris nods. “Good,” he says. “Glad we have this settled. I need to get back to work, anyway.”

Dustin grins, but Mark barely notices. This seems to be how all of their Skype conferences end, long and drawn-out and nostalgic. Mark isn’t a fan of nostalgia.

“Yeah, same,” Dustin says. “The boss is a real pain in my ass.”

“I feel you,” Chris says, and smiles back.

Mark clicks a button to end the call before Dustin and Chris start making kissy faces at each other (it’s happened before) and Mark kicks Dustin out of his office, even when Dustin complains. Mark locks the door behind him.

This is a place of business; Dustin shouldn’t be surprised when his boss tells his employee to get back to work. Mark wouldn’t mind getting back to work himself. He skips reading his millions of unanswered emails and goes straight to coding.

Only, after about five minutes of going over code for their next scheduled update, Mark has determined that this isn’t going to work. Even with his headphones on and his computer in front of him, he can’t forget about the conversation with Chris, and he can’t forget the sound of Eduardo’s voice. And the more he thinks about these things, the less he wants to forget them.

Chris said Mark couldn’t “have his cake and eat it, too,” but there were two things fundamentally wrong with that statement. Firstly, Mark never “had his cake.” Eduardo sued him (For the record, Mark didn’t exactly enjoy being deposed with Eduardo, either.) and then Mark paid Eduardo a hefty settlement fee in exchange for never seeing his best friend again. He made the decision that was correct for his company, but that doesn’t mean he enjoyed it.

Mark isn’t a fan of nostalgia; he doesn’t feel nostalgia for Eduardo. What he’s realizing, though, is that the feeling like he’s waiting, the way Eduardo’s voice over the phone made him shake—while it certainly isn’t nostalgia…it might be regret. Whatever it is, it’s weird and it’s unnatural. Mark hates it. If losing Eduardo was the right decision for Facebook, then it’s possible that for the first time in his entire life—in his life since Facebook, at least—Mark isn’t sure the right choice for Facebook was the right choice for himself.

The second thing that was wrong with Chris’s statement, of course, was that Mark became a billionaire at the age of twenty-three. Even though he hasn’t used those business cards in months, he’s still CEO, bitch, he still _invented_ _Facebook_. Mark he isn’t afraid to do what it takes to get whatever he wants.

Chris said it’s too late for Mark’s friendship with Eduardo, and perhaps he’s right. He can’t fix what’s permanently broken. That’s fine, though. Mark has got a talent for finding unlikely solutions.

Mark exits out of his programming software and brings up a new internet browser window. You can’t solve a problem until you know you have a problem.

He gets to work.


End file.
